Definition through difference: The tradition of black-white miscegenation in American fiction

Since World War II, American miscegenation fiction has undergone dynamic change. Influenced by a changing social and literary climate, many avant garde white and black writers struggle against the limitations of race-specific conventions that traditionally have hampered serious literary treatments of racial assimilation in the United States. Both traditions show marked advances in the 1980s, especially, with startlingly revolutionary works by Rita Mae Brown and Charles Johnson that exemplify exciting new directions for a familiar story.; This comparative study utilizes a Brooksian psychoanalytic critical strategy in uncovering the hidden movements of narrative and in decoding implicit and often conflicting ideological messages within the texts. Instead of being an hermetically-sealed exercise in literary analysis, however, this bi-racial study seeks to relativize each work within its social and historical milieu, and to show how each work illuminates the extra-literary realm in provocative ways.; Early chapters establish traditional white- and black-authored conventions by analyzing classic nineteenth-century miscegenation texts by white writers like James Fenimore Cooper and William Dean Howells, and by black writers like Frank Webb and Frances E. W. Harper. Early twentieth century writers, Nella Larsen and William Faulkner among them, largely perpetuate trends while adding psychological depth and literary sophistication.; Formal and ideological change comes after World War II when both black and white writers experiment by adopting each other's conventions. Liberal white writers such as Lillian Smith, Sinclair Lewis, Erskine Caldwell, and the lesser known Cid Ricketts Sumner write miscegenation novels that superficially idealize blackness. Their attempts signal an era of transition, however, since their works are often marred by apparently unconscious racism and hidden white race-flattery.; Similarly, black writers such as Willard Savoy, Frank Yerby, and Frank Hercules adopt white convention in depicting lasting interracial relationships. These works juxtapose solidarist black-authored works of the period by such writers as William Gardner Smith, Chester Himes, James Baldwin, John Oliver Killens, and Alice Walker, some of which are artistically limited by nationalistic didacticism and racial chauvinism.